Amtrak Acela

The Virtual Railfan site on You Tube has a video of it going by North East, PA

Tom (WRAWROACX) posted pictures of the New Acela in this thread.

Thank you #2 Turtle, Greg and Tom!  There was a little difference in the support equipment on the west bound trip. Behind the Amtrak locomotives was a dining car and the (presume) dormitory car was different.   All totalled up it was a neat train!

Railfans out west on the BNSF (presumed route to Denver and Pueblo) should be on the lookout for it.

Thanks for all the info. 

Now a question... does anyone know if the current paint scheme is final??? Maybe it’s just me, but the transition between the engines and the cars is very jarring - it seems like they came for two different trains.

Paul - if you google avelia liberty, wikipedia has a sketch of the powercar paint scheme which shows some transition artwork flowing from the front end into the trailing cars.  Hopefully something like that will be done.

A few interesting factoids, gleaned from the google machine and the Alstom and Amtrak websites.  The current Acela was made by a Bombardier/Alstom consortium - the new Avelia liberty is entirely Alstom - made (or at least assembled) in NY state.  Alstom (maker of the French high speed TGV trainsets) has a pretty big market in Europe, besides ze French, including the new Italo rail trainsets (my earlier thread is here:  italian-high-speed-trains )  The ETV 575 powercar looks very similar to the Avelia liberty power car - though the power is distributed among several cars in the Italo trainset, while for the Avelia Liberty only the two power cars will have power.  Also the Liberty has nine passenger cars, all articulated using Jacobs bogies, carrying ~380 passengers while the current Acela has 6 passenger cars (semi-permanently coupled but not articulated) carrying ~300 passengers.  Wikipedia has more info, including some links to recent press releases, etc.

Thanks Rich - very informative. I saw two different paint schemes resulting from the search - both of them show much more esthetically pleasing transition from the power car to the passenger cars.

Alstom just purchased Bombardier’s rail division... so it comes full circle!  

The original Ascela cars were built in Quebec and finished in Barre, VT.  It was always entertaining watching a 1949 ALCo pulling the cars down through the light rails and tight turns of what was essentially a mining road.

Jon  

Passenger Rail service seems to continue.   Roads, automobile, truck, bus traffic, approach grid lock, certain locations. Even Airports, and air travel, have become more congested, IMO.   It will be interesting to see what happens, another 50 years.  

I'm sure the Alstom lettering is for the prototype.  The locos look better with their coupler covers on... but how long will those last?

Jon